I nearly forgot to post this, as everyone seemed to be starting Easter early on Good Friday. Based on the Tin Chooky that stands in our hearth, here's this year's Easter greeting card. Made mainly from primitives in Designer, with a little bit of Photo.
No birds were harmed in the making of this image. Nor chocolate!

I don't know if this will help, but ... many, many years ago when I was a kid, my grandfather, who was a talented draughtsman, told me if I was short on inspiration to make a doodle -- just scribble a few lines or loops -- then see what it inspires. This is more use to an artist than a designer, maybe -- but if you're desperate it might just help.

Thanks gdenby! What I did for the blur was, for instance, to duplicate the body layer, then delete all the nodes except the nearer back foot, so I could then blur the duplicate foot. It's a matter of thinking out the effect you want, then working out how you could do it, the trying it till you get it right. Motion blur -- radial in this case to suggest swinging movement -- and then moving and/or rotating the layer for the best effect. Patience is a definite advantage!
These are the two stills I chose (saved fro Serif MoviePlus) ...
You'll see I've rotated the top image to align it with the bottom one. And here are the first two vectors, traced around the bodies and the head ...

I'm working through the AD Workbook, and the first example seemed a little too easy for an old hand (or do I mean know-all?) like me, so I decided to try something a little more ambitious. So I did a tiger. It wasn't bad, but I thought I could do better ... so I did another one. Here it is ...
This is reduced to about 70% of the original size. In the book, Ben The Illustrator says he often works from videos rather than still photos, so I looked out one or two videos on the internet. This image is made from two stills, as the real thing didn't look exciting enough! I made vector shapes on separate layers of: the body and nearer legs; the tail; the head; the further legs; and the stripes -- the stripes I clipped to their layers so i didn't have to fiddle about with the edges. I saved that as an AD file, then as an AP file, which I then edited with some motion and radial blur to give a sense of movement. As I went along, I duplicated some of the layers and rasterised them, so I could add some shading and clip them. Finally, I made up a background from a couple of texture images, and added a shadow underneath the animal.

Terrific work, Leo! I learned to draw with a pencil, but I had to learn to draw with a mouse years ago when I started using computers. When I got a laptop I had to learn to draw with the trackpad -- and it's not that difficult to be delicate, once you get used to it. I've got a Wacom tablet, but I don;t bother with it very often.

I'm trying out the AP beta on a Windows 7 laptop. I've been attempting to use a perspective projection, but it keeps shutting down with no error message. It's also crashed on other occasions; there doesn't seem to be any common factor here, and I haven't been able to report the problem in the usual way. I have nothing else running apart from Windows Explorer to keep track of files.

Nice work, Melissa!
As a long-time computer user (I go back to punched cards and paper tape!) I've always found the best way to get the hang of new software is simply to play with it and see what happens. It looks as if you're already getting to grips with AP looking forward to seeing what you do next!